Let's talk about an unusually despicable, ridiculous, bigoted, and potentially dangerously unbalanced and violence-threatening lawyer — Jason Lee Van Dyke.
Why do I say those things about him?
Potentially dangerously unbalanced and violence-threatening:
Jason L. Van Dyke, Texas attorney (for now), likes threatening violence against people who make fun of him or criticize him or question him online. Recently he's been getting questioned, ridiculed, and criticized a lot, since he filed suit seeking to force Victoria County District Attorney Stephen B. Tyler to explain why he rescinded a job offer to make Van Dyke a deputy prosecutor. (Probable answer: Tyler didn't do any due diligence before making the offer to Van Dyke and belatedly discovered he appears to be a bigoted lunatic.)
Take this weekend. When Twitter-user Asher Langton criticized, questioned, and ridiculed him, Van Dyke resorted to physical threats. He referred to Langton's home town of Omaha and discussed attacking him:
This is not the first time Van Dyke has extravagantly threatened violence in response to people writing about him and his behavior. Observe:
Cletus the pretend ninja
It's not the first time he's threatened @AsherLangton, either. Consider this email from a few months ago:
Yes, an all-around charmer.
Image courtesy of TechDirt
And great with clients and potential clients!
Nothing but good times.
Guns appear to make up a very prominent part of Van Dyke's life. That's fine, in the abstract — many Americans are fond of guns, and the vast majority of them aren't threatening thinskinned freaks, but responsible. Let's hope Van Dyke doesn't kill anyone in the throes of the sort of pique that seems to be his defining characteristic.
Fraudulent Buffoonery
Why do I call Texas attorney Jason L. Van Dyke fraudulent? That's my opinion of him based on these facts: he misrepresented a joke to a court in an attempt to get a bogus default judgment against a defendant.
Back in 2014, Van Dyke sued a revenge porn site called PinkMeth on behalf of one of its victims. Suing a revenge porn site is a mitzvah. Revenge pornsters are scum, and if there is a lawful and constitutional way to take them down and inflict life-destroying consequences on their creators and users, decent people should. But the enemy of my enemy is not my friend, and not everyone who fights evil is good. Van Dyke is not good.
Neither is Van Dyke's pal, Kyle Bristow. Bristow, who was rejected by Young Americans for Freedom as too nuts, is a dreamy-eyed writer of white nationalist slashfic, an aspiring early retiree from an unpleasant squalor of the "urban" [cough] world, and someone who shared Van Dyke's outrage at revenge porn, mostly because it targeted nice white girls.
“Revenge pornography is nothing more than a manifestation of liberalism,” Bristow said. “Most victims on revenge pornography websites are young, white, blonde, middle class, American women. Women who the pornographers can link to conservatism or Christianity are especially targeted for harassment.”
What a buddy comedy this is shaping up to be!
Anyway, at one point in the course of typical online back-and-forth shittalking, PinkMeth joked that its lawyer was Kyle Bristow and even swiped Bristol's photo as its Twitter image to troll people. Bristow, in fact, was helping Van Dyke with his case, not representing the defendants. But Van Dyke pulled what can only be called a short (and dumb) con on the court — he purported to serve PinkMeth by giving the complaint to Bristow at Bristow's office address and sought a default against PinkMeth on that basis, misrepresenting to the court that PinkMeth's listing of Bristow was sincere rather than obviously trolling. Now, a very unusually careful clerk might have caught it based on the tone of the documents about Bristow that Van Dyke attached, but that's unlikely.
This sequence of events shows that Texas attorney Jason L. Van Dyke committed fraud on a court. Trolling stops at the courthouse door — the fact that PinkMeth (which, let's not forget, is a revenge porn site run by scum who should be used to mulch lawns) was trolling does not excuse misleading a judge.
Vexatious Litigation
Why do I call Texas attorney Jason L. Van Dyke a vexatious litigant? That's my opinion based on his history of litigation and threats of litigation. Among other things:
In suing PinkMeth, he also sued the Tor Project, which produces free open-source software that protects online anonymity. Is the Tor Project engaged in revenge porn? Only in the sense that the California Department of Transportation is engaged in bank robberies if I flee one on a public road, or Verizon is engaged in interstate threats if I use a cell phone to make one. It was a riotously frivolous and probably sanctionable argument, as discussed here and here and here and here and here and here. He quickly dropped the suit with a mostly incoherent non-apology.
Then there's the lawsuit-threatening. He's into blustery, extravagant, agitated threats of lawsuits, and boasts about past threats and lawsuits, particularly over imagined defamation. Consider how he reacted with fury and threats to an Above the Law post about his little pal Kyle Bristow:
Not to mention Van Dyke's frivolous attempt to sue a sitting District Attorney to force him into a deposition explaining why he rescinded Van Dyke's job offer. It's possible to feel a little sympathy here for Van Dyke — he closed his practice and sold a home — but his theory is ridiculous. The issue is that District Attorney Stephen B. Tyler did an abysmally poor job of vetting Van Dyke before offering him vast power as a prosecutor. But Van Dyke thinks the issue is that nobody ought to be allowed to say "hey, maybe don't hire a bigoted lunatic to be a prosecutor, huh?" and that anyone who says that (which, by the way, would be classic petitioning the government, protected by the First Amendment) owes him money. No, Jason. No. Ask a real lawyer to explain how that works.
Bigotry
Before I explain why I think Texas attorney Jason L. Van Dyke is a bigot – and a cowardly, cringing one at that — let me explain how it matters. Bigotry in the abstract isn't against the law, and shouldn't be. Most of the bigoted things Van Dyke allegedly said are obviously protected by the First Amendment, as is his right to associate with awful people. It's only an issue for two reasons. First, overt bigots shouldn't be hired as prosecutors. Only genteel people who will let the criminal justice system's manifest structural bigotry take care of business should be hired as prosecutors. Second, Van Dyke threatens people — physically and with litigation — when they comment on his bigotry. That's news.
Van Dyke's been a conservative bomb-thrower for a long time, but that's not the same as bigotry. His rhetoric, though, gradually veered in that direction. Years back he filed a truly execrably writen amicus brief in a gay marriage case.1 His activism — including that and some work on behalf of Young Americans for Freedom — earned some pushback from gay rights activists, including one who published documents relating to an expunged criminal proceeding against Van Dyke. Van Dyke tried, belatedly and unsuccessfully, to have his old records sealed. When he failed, he flamed out in classic Van Dyke style on a blog he has now memory-holed:
AIDS Infected Faggot and his Moonbat Buddy Are Playing With Fire
AIDS-ridden highway rest stop bathroom connoisseur Todd Heywood may not like what he gets when he plays with fire. When I first heard that he managed to convince a judge to essentially ignore the law and the clear intent of the Michigan legislature, I thought about just letting this one go. The truth of the matter is that Todd Heywood will die a horrible death due to complications from AIDS and will be screaming and rotting in Hell before I am even halfway into my career. Unfortunately for him, I don’t think there are any reststops on the road to the Malebolge – although I am sure he will find himself in the company of an entire legion of faggots.
Suffice to say, I am not going to let this stand. I plan on filing an Application for Leave to Appeal with the circuit court by the end of next week. In the interim, I am nearly finished compiling the information needed for a lawsuit that I intend to file against these two moonbats. Maybe, after spending a fortune on legal bills only to end up paying a hefty judgment, they will think twice before they tangle with me again.
Earlier this year, curious about where else Mr. Van Dyke had been expressing himself, @AsherLangton did a little digging. He found that someone posting on the notorious white supremacist site Stormfront under the name "WNLaw" (White Nationalist Law, one presumes) had remarkable parallels to Van Dyke. These screenshots are reprinted with his permission, and the investigative work is all his:
WNLaw describes petition
That same petition was created by "J.V."
WNLaw sings praises of Van Dyke and Bristow, showing knowledge of their background
WNLaw, like Van Dyke, left Michigan for Texas
WNLaw is a firearms instructor
So is JLVD
Ladies, WNLaw is a lawyer named Jason in Texas into shooting and martial arts
Van Dyke is a lawyer named Jason in Texas into guns and martial arts
WNLaw does debt collection law
Van Dyke does debt collection law
And so forth and so on, in this thread.
This began Van Dyke's campaign of threats — both ambiguous and explicit — against @AsherLangton.
Blustery douches have an unmistakable tone, like a moral lisp.
In April, spurred by his threats, I wrote to Mr. Van Dyke seeking comment about @AsherLangton's discoveries — both inquiring whether he did, in fact, post on Stormfront, and asking whether he thought that had a bearing on his suitability for working as a prosecutor. He responded with what I would characterize as evasive, contradictory, game-playing, and increasingly agitated emails, which included him promising "swift and certain punishment"2, a statement that he would make an example "in Court or otherwise" of me or anyone else who "damages his career" with a story, and saying "prepare for full retaliation." Judge the emails yourself in a footnote.3 — I have removed only references to a third party who attempted to mediate between us. I would characterize them as denying he was WNLaw at Stormfront, arguing that there was nothing necessary wrong with posting on Stormfront depending on the content, saying that he'd need to see the posts to comment, saying that the media misrepresents what racism is, and (as far as I could figure) saying that someone else was posting stuff pretending to be him.
Subsequently Mr. Van Dyke has become a vocal Proud Boy:
Proud Boys are proud of not masturbating except within approximately five feet of a woman, ritualistic public tickle fights, and — notwithstanding the foregoing — Western Culture and their imagined role in creating it.
I find the evidence persuasive that Van Dyke is and always was WNLaw. My view is that a willing resident of Stormfront is, in fact, a bigot. My view is that the Proud Boys are not Stormfront, but largely because they aren't brave enough to be Stormfront in public. Your views may vary.
In Summary
What do you call an unbalanced, violent-threat-spewing, vexatious-litigating, bigoted, court-defrauding proudly-unethical simple-minded lout in Texas?
A member of the Texas State Bar, apparently.
Most of what Van Dyke is doing (apart from the fraud on the court and, perhaps, some of the threats) is legal. More vexatious lawsuits will be dealt with with appropriately, in court, using Texas' quite good anti-SLAPP statute. Anyone threatened with litigation should feel free to reach out for help finding pro bono counsel. More florid threats, or actual violence, will be handled by appropriate authorities, who respond well to thorough documentation.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author.
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